Study Data from Victoria University of Wellington Update Knowledge of Management Science (Managing Risk As a Duality of Harm and Benefit: a Study of Organizational Risk Objects In the Global Insurance Industry)

2019 DEC 12 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at NewsRx Science Daily -- Researchers detail new data in Science - Management Science. According to news reporting originating from Wellington, New Zealand, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “This study examines how organizations construct and manage risk objects as a duality of harm-benefit within their normal operations. It moves beyond the existing focus on accidents, disasters and crisis.”

Financial supporters for this research include Economic and Social Research Council, British Academy of Management, Insurance Intellectual Capital Initiative, Lloyd’s Tercentenary Foundation, Worshipful Company of Insurers.

Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from the Victoria University of Wellington, “We study the risk-transfer processes of 35 insurers where they navigate the tension of retaining risk in their insurance portfolio to increase the benefit of making profit and transferring risk to reinsurance to reduce the harm of paying claims. We show that organizations’ constructions of risk are underpinned by everyday risk management practices of centralizing, calculating and diversifying. Through variation in these practices, not all organizations seek balance and we in turn uncover the sensemaking processes of abstracting and localizing that enable organizations to prioritize harm or benefit. This contributes to the risk literature by illuminating the co-constitutive relationship between risk sensemaking processes and everyday risk management practices. Following the complex linkages involved in the construction of risk objects as sources of harm-benefit, our analysis also contributes to the literature on dualities. It shows that while immediate trade-offs between harm-benefit occur, prioritizing one element of the duality is ultimately a means for attaining the other.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Thus, while initial imbalance is evident, prioritization can be an enabling approach to navigating duality.”

For more information on this research see: Managing Risk As a Duality of Harm and Benefit: a Study of Organizational Risk Objects In the Global Insurance Industry. British Journal of Management, 2019;():. British Journal of Management can be contacted at: Wiley, 111 River St, Hoboken 07030-5774, NJ, USA. (Wiley-Blackwell - http://www.wiley.com/; British Journal of Management - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1467-8551)

The news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting R. Bednarek, Victoria University, Wellington 6012, New Zealand. Additional authors for this research include K. Chalkias and P. Jarzabkowski.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12389. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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